Skeletal mesh animation driven by few positional constraints

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a whole animation pipeline for data‐driven character animation. Considering that the traditional animation pipeline, including skeleton reconstruction from markers, rigging, and retargeting, is subject to potential loss of information and precision, our objective is to control in real time articulated meshes from a low number of positional constraints. Our method is based on an efficient deformation technique that integrates into a volumetric control structure the high‐resolution mesh, the skeleton, and relevant marker locations. An iterative optimization method, which preserves both geometric characteristics, segment lengths and joint limits, is applied to this structure. We show the ability of our system to interactively animate and deform high‐resolution models from few positional constraints while keeping all the details of the movement.

Contact preserving shape transfer: Retargeting motion from one shape to another

“…egocentric mapping to preserve the topology between body parts, that are applied on a body surface approximation. Other methods use a complete surface mesh together with a skeleton [32,25] to control the surface mesh deformation while preserving the coherence with the skeleton topology. By satisfying both skeletal and surface constraints, natural animations and poses can be generated.…”

“…By satisfying both skeletal and surface constraints, natural animations and poses can be generated. While deformation transfer is not the primal contribution of these works, the associated methods can be adapted to this purpose with convincing results as in [32]. Nevertheless, works in this category do not yet account for surface interactions and substantial collisions can appear when transferring poses between significantly different shapes.…”

Signing Avatars - Multimodal Challenges for Text-to-sign Generation

“…Multichannel coordination is one of the main challenges Hand animation with 3D mesh constraints (image extracted from [27]) of animation systems for SL. It involves the spatial ordering and the temporal synchronization of the movements generated on their respective channels (either by extraction from the database or by synthesis) in order to respect the spatiotemporal patterns of the signs.…”

Contact Preserving Shape Transfer For Rigging-Free Motion Retargeting

“…Molla et al [Molla et al 2018] used the skeleton to model the pose with joint angles, but added constraints (egocentric mapping to preserve the topology between body parts) applied on body surface approximation. Other methods used a complete surface mesh together with the skeleton [Huang et al 2013;Le Naour et al 2019] to control the surface mesh deformation while preserving the coherence with the skeleton topology. By respecting both skeletal and surface constraints, they are able to generate natural animations and poses.…”

“…By respecting both skeletal and surface constraints, they are able to generate natural animations and poses. While deformation transfer is not the main contribution of these works, their methods can be adapted for this purpose to obtain convincing results [Le Naour et al 2019]. However these works have not explored surface interactions, and important collisions can appear for deformation transfer to significantly different shapes.…”